USAspending.gov gives away every federal award for nothing, and 1Lookup turns one company's contracts into a single answer for $0.015 when it has any.

Reading what the federal government spends and who receives it. Its home page calls it the official open data source of federal spending information, including contracts, grants and loans, and its recipient search has tabs for All Awards, Contracts, Grants, Direct Payments, Loans and Other Financial Assistance. Its API serves the same data as JSON.

It is free. Checked October 2026: the pages list no plan, quota or charge, and a keyless request to its recipient endpoint was answered with a 200, so there is no key or account to get. The pages print no rate limit and no uptime commitment, so a product built on the API carries its own retries and timeouts.

3 credits per company with federal awards, free when the company has no federal awards. On the Starter plan ($99 a month for 20,000 credits) a company is about $0.015, which covers 6,666 companies a month and is $14.85 per 1,000. At the Enterprise end of the rate card it is about $0.006. USAspending.gov is the cheaper bill by definition: it costs nothing, and you pay for the time to build and keep the lookup instead.

A recipient search on USAspending.gov returns a list of registrations, each with an id ending in P, C or R (parent, child or recipient with no parent), a UEI and an amount labelled 'Awarded Amount (from trailing 12 months of transactions)'. The agencies, the industries and the contract dollars over a window you choose come from separate spending-by-category calls with filters you build. 1Lookup returns the finished answer: the contract dollars over the last three completed federal fiscal years with the window named, the number of contract awards, the top five agencies and the top five industries with their dollars, the parent, the state and whether the company is a small business.

One search on USAspending.gov for a large contractor's name matched 272 recipient rows on 25 October 2026, parents, children and look-alikes. 1Lookup reads the candidates and takes the one that clearly leads, such as an exact name or an exact UEI. If several companies fit, it returns up to five of them with their UEI and state, so you can look again with the UEI, and it charges nothing for that answer.

The total counts contract awards over the last three completed federal fiscal years (October 1 to September 30), which is FY2024 to FY2026 in October 2026, and the answer names the window it used. Grants, loans and direct payments are not in that total. The answer adds the company's awards of all years and, when the company has loans, their face value, as separate figures. A company with only older awards, or only grants, shows no contract dollars in the window and is not charged.

Both read the same public record, so 1Lookup is only as current as USAspending.gov is. A repeat lookup of the same input by the same user within one day is answered from the cache at no charge. If the source cannot be reached after one retry, 1Lookup returns an error and charges nothing.

Not for research. If you want every award, grants and loans, a single award's detail or a bulk download, USAspending.gov is the place and it is free. 1Lookup is for the narrow question that comes up in a workflow: does this company really hold federal contracts, how much, and who pays it. It is one call with a stable answer, so there is no registration to choose and no breakdown to add up in your code.

Yes. A 12-character UEI is looked up first, and if nobody carries it the same text is read as a name. When both a name and a UEI are sent, the UEI wins. A name can be 2 to 150 characters, and a trailing legal word such as Corporation or Inc. is ignored when matching, so Lockheed Martin Corp. and Lockheed Martin Corporation share one answer.

If you want the raw federal record for nothing, USAspending.gov itself is the answer and there is no better one. If you want one company's contract dollars, awards, agencies and industries without writing the search, the registration choice and the three breakdown calls, 1Lookup's Federal Contractor Lookup bills 3 credits only when the company has federal awards, on the same balance as phone, email and IP checks.

On price and breadth. It is free, it covers grants, loans, direct payments and every other award type as well as contracts, it goes down to the single award, and its endpoint list includes downloads that generate a zipped file of award data. 1Lookup returns the contract totals of one company and does not list awards.

If you check a handful of companies a month, read USAspending.gov directly and pay nothing. If a team checks companies every day, as part of vetting a vendor, qualifying a lead or screening a counterparty, the per-company price buys back the minutes spent choosing between look-alike registrations and adding up the breakdowns, and a CSV with a company column returns one row per company.